Play energy in its strongest and expressive forms is usually missing, diluted or found randomly in most learning environments, yet it is deemed important and crucial as a basis for learning. It is even more absent from computers where users, in order to benefit, are locked into tightly defined ‘point and click’ behavior patterns by the computer interface.
Similarly, because primary tools, models, and systems for delivering, configuring, and distributing play energy have not been available, active and expressive play is absent from many educational classroom activities and products. This component, an active and defined play component, has been missing from systems because it has not been clearly seen or rendered practical enough to materialize beyond the tightly confined limits of the monitor and the keyboard. For example, images found on computer screens or on the pages of books remain anchored there with no practical way to move them off for physical manipulation, use, or play.
To grasp the full significance of the problem, it is helpful to be familiar with recent research to apply brain science to educational practice. Recent developments in evolving high-touch tools and applied brain science include: The Hand (Frank R. Wilson); sign language and gesturing studies (MIT Media Lab); Learning and Intelligence Systems (National Science Foundation); The Triune Brain (Paul MacLean, National Institutes of Health); the Smithsonian Institution's Object-based Education mission as well as its recently sponsored program, The Playful Mind.
The recent acknowledgment of music's capacity to modulate and enhance brain development in young children leads us to consider the deeper roots of learning. To reform the infrastructure of education, similar tools of transformation may be applied to the neurological nerve centers of communication and language.
The advent of the Internet has allowed the introduction of distance learning techniques and interactive educational and entertainment experiences. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,446, directed to an internet based distance learning system. This system allows clients to communicate with each other or with teachers using different communication techniques via a common user interface. More specifically, this system integrates the use of a plurality of different communication techniques for interfacing over the Internet between a central server and a plurality of independent user computer stations which are geographically separated. This system creates virtual common room atmosphere for all the users which allows real-time interactions among the users irrespective of their geographical location.
Another example of an educational system using interactive multimedia is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,648, which focuses on an assessment system used by students, educators and administrators to build an evolving student portfolio over the years of schooling whereby interests and activities emerge and are recorded that point the student in a variety of directions for potential vocations and advocations.
While many new enhancements to technology and media continue to evolve within high-tech platforms (such as those described in the aforementioned patents), the one sphere for training, education and entertainment that remains completely absent—because it is so difficult to grasp and even more difficult to include as a viable component—and even more so as one whose use and impact is seen outside and away from the computer—is the one involving the use of the hand. In both evolutionary and immediate terms, the use of the hand is considered a major facilitating agent of verbal communication in the learning process. The computer output and use of handheld, moving and talking artifacts and images made exclusively of paper (and the on-line modeling thereof) represents a unique convergence of biologically-based play energy, media, and technology. This unique formula for delivering play-based learning and communication results in higher-level expressiveness, emotional and visual thinking. To capture and engage the hands-on sphere (which is known to facilitate the oral communication) and apply it as handheld, moving artifacts to expressive communication, emotions, images, represents a unique, fundamental amalgam of biological energy (play), media, and high technology. Absent from the prior art is the hands-on component, a playful component in which a relationship between the student, the teacher and images (visual-textual information) is advanced. The advent of computers and the internet has opened a whole new era for education, and yet the images found on computer screens remain anchored and flat. Educational applications of the computer must inevitably find ways to push past the monitor and the keyboard.
Classroom communication is slowly becoming more than flat talk and text-covered worksheets. However, if adults are to reach the young in any meaningful way, communication must become more visual, interactive, emotive. It must reach all kinds of learners and appeal to students whose intelligence does not respond to traditional communication patterns and modes. It must engage the hands and create meaningful experience so that children can relate and remember what they learn. It should help to reduce stress by making group dynamics joyful and energetic. It must work to support learning skills and propensities that children already come equipped with so that teaching actually supports and recognizes the strengths that reside in every individual learner.
Long considered as symbols of play and more recently as tools for learning, puppets are widely recognized for their special influence on learning and social development, and have been shown to exert a powerful effect on children of all ages. Given the invasive problems and challenges of learning and socialization in mass society, which stem in part from breakdowns and inadequacies in communication, there is a high demand for modes of communication—especially in the classroom'that have a positive impact on children. Puppets have always met this need. While it is true that children play with all kinds of artifacts (not just puppets) that are often made to move and talk; a sustained, systematic application of participative play language, learning, communication, and technology, until now has not been available.